High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo Archives - Page 464 of 481

February 26, 2006 by Michael

The Grass Always Seems Greener

… over in somebody ELSE’S system.

Repeat after me:

There is no perfect speaker.

There is no perfect amplifier.

There is no perfect…

It is the components that one Hasn’t heard that are the most incidious at making us doubters, making us wonder if THEY perhaps are the *** U-L-T-I-M-A-T-E *** COMPONENT.

Some of the Jones’ components are good, most are just OK, just like all components once you actually get to hear them for yourself.

It is the one’s we haven’t heard, where we wonder “maybeTHAT box has EVERYTHING… sophistication AND magic AND impressiveness!”, that are the most insidious, making us doubt everything we have learned up until now.

Truth: There are very, very few components that really ARE significantly greener than the rest. Most are just… different. Hey, at least half are actually worse than average :-).

However, it is the actual hearing one of these 8th wonders of the world that REALLY gets us hooked, dooms us to keep looking, always looking, across the street to see if the grass really IS greener over there.

It is our job here, our responsibility, tough life that we have, to scout around the 1000s of speakers, 1000s of amps, and cables and cd players, and preamps and powercords and determine which are truly special and which are just …nice.

Unlike most dealers we actually do not care if they ‘sell well’ – if they are really great sounding we will make the effort ourselves to help build their brand and get the word out there.

Unlike most reviewers we do not have to find a great component each and every month.

Unlike most reviewers (and most dealers who seem to rely more on the big bamboozle – yes, I just had to put bamboozle in somewhere; bamboozle is just too fun of a word to leave out of any good Blog for too awfully long 🙂 ) we actually care about how the components really sound because we play them here for very picky people who will spend some of their hard-earned to take what they are hearing home with them if they really like what they hear (and can afford what they hear).

We take this responsibility to heart – some components are really pretty good so there is no real need to replace them with the hot new brand X, the grass often really isn’t greener (it just the low angle you are looking at it from that makes it look greener 🙂 ) – save a few bucks.

OK, three smiley faces is all I allocate myself for each post (not really, but I bet you wish it were true) so I had better be…

…outa here.

February 22, 2006 by Michael

Nordost VIDAR Cable Burn-in Device

Nordost Reference Dealers, like us happy folks at Audio Federation, now have another tool that will make sure that the cables their customers receive now sound even more better, yes, more better, than the competition than they already did before. And what a monster, er, make that kick-ass tool it is.

Physically the unit is about 9.5 inches by 17 inches and weighs, I don’t know, say about 10 lbs.

What does it do? And how does it do it?

What it does, using 44 amplifiers, is:

1. Neutralizes spurious charges that build up around the cables and its insulation.

2. Conditions the conductor core, which changes the way signals pass through the metal using wide-band sonics

3. Conditions the surface of the conductors using ultrasonics

How does it do it?

The VIDAR “uses a proprietary combination of composite and complex signals to condition the cable.” I bet you could have probably guessed that part.

The process involves ultra-low frequencies (to condition the core of the conductor), ultra-high frequencies (to condition the surface of the conductor), bouncing the signal ping-pong fashionup and down the length of the cable. The manual then goes on to describe how the VIDAR conditions the rest of the conductor as well as the dielectric area above the conductor.

Does it work?

Don’t know yet. It was very cold when it got here so applying power anytime soon was out of the question.

But sometime…. we really should do some listening tests; perhaps one interconnect brand new, and another brand new but burned-in / broken-in / conditioned.

Our general experience has been we have never experienced any deleterious effects from burning in anything, and burning in does seem to add some predictability to the sonics, taking some of the edge off that seems to be occaisionally heard with a brand new cable sometimes… [sometimes we are in too much of a hurry to hear a cable and wham bamm out of the packaging and into the system it goes – so we do sometimes experience what un-burned-in cables sound like 🙂 ].

In any case, it at least looks cool – and it is heavy enough that the cables won’t tip it over. About 95% of the time our customers do want their cables burned-in before we send them out – and we are always happy to do so.

February 19, 2006 by Michael

Foiled Again by … Fingerprints

Doh!

We are slowly creating an online catalog of the products we carry in order to provide both a more traditional presentation in this online medium and as a way to show off how awesome some of this equipment is.

But one of the problems with all this nice, shiny equipment is that when one has to move it, adjust it, or do ANTTHING with it, one leaves finger prints. Big honkin’ smudges. This is similar to the dreaded dust buildup problem, except that it is harder to remedy (The hell if I am going to wear gloves to use my equipment, no way no how 🙂 )

For example, in the catlog there is the picture of the Brinkmann Balance turntable. Nice picture I think. Spent the time to remove the background in Photoshop, added it to the webpages and then uploaded them – only to finally notice after all this that there are smudges on the platter where someone was too impatient to wait for it to slow down and used their fingers to force it to stop. [This photo was taken at the HE 2005 show – so it wasn’t me who was the impatient one… this time 🙂 ]

This isn’t the only piece in the catalog that had finger prints that stood out like a sore thumb. But the others I was able to use photoshop to dissapear them.

So, I’ll take another picture of the Balance we have here and redo the picture – but the real problem is that finger prints are all over our equipment, as they probably are all over yours, and all these smudges distract from the visual aesthetic of the pieces and of the overall listening experience. But in reality we are just too lazy and too ‘the visual aesthetics shouldn’t matter – its the music stupid’ that this will not likely change here any time soon at the Audio Federation.

But if someone came out with an audiophile-grade equipment polish – say Walker Audio, it could come with the VIVID CD polisher and the SST silver contact enhancer – then I bet we could convince one of us here (not me) to spend the time and apply the polish very few weeks, and remove the fingerprints so that my photos would not be pictures of equipment with fingerprints all over them.

What do you say, you entrepreneurs out there? Let me know when it ships!

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